I’ve been an AdWords consultant for 15 years so I’ve seen a lot of changes in technology and the advertising industry as a whole. But I’m now starting to see something that is having a profound impact on many small businesses. It is very concerning and I have nothing but empathy for many of these small business owners. I call it the death of the Yellow Pages.

Many successful small businesses that have been around for decades, built their business almost exclusively on Yellow Page advertising. Even though the costs kept going up, it was worth it because it kept the phone ringing and profits rolling in. But as the age of the internet began to take hold, the Yellow Pages book got pushed further and further back on the shelf, until it eventually landed in the trash, mostly because of one phenomenon, Google.com.

Some business owners were quick to see the trend and turned it into a competitive advantage, while others went kicking and screaming into the internet and smartphone age. Many of these reluctant business owners built minimal websites that quickly became out-dated and they resisted learning anymore than they absolutely needed to know about online advertising. They quickly became overwhelmed and confused, but the Yellow Pages were still producing enough leads to make this only a mild frustration. They could still make ends meet.

To make matters worse, many unscrupulous online marketing firms seized on the opportunity to sign up naïve businesses by making flowery claims of “being on the first page of Google” and promising a flood of qualified leads. These firms kept a sizeable list of unhappy clients too scared or confused to make a move, even though the business owners became increasingly disenchanted with their online advertising performance.

Then came the tipping point, the Yellow Pages finally died. This left many business owners stranded. In spite of cutting back staff, reducing inventory, hours of operation, geographic territory and advertising spend, it became an unstoppable downward spiral. They became stranded because they had not invested the time or resources to keep up with changing market conditions.

Many of these same businesses depleted their resources to the point where they simply couldn’t afford to make the investment necessary to catch up. And quite frankly, they simply don’t have the will.

One thing is now clear, if they have any chance of surviving, they must be able to be found on Google. But they don’t have the knowledge to make an informed decision on how best to do it. So they look for anyone who promises to make the phone ring again. And there are still plenty of firms out there that will imply or even promise to make that happen. Even Google will sometimes over promise and under deliver. I go out of my way to make it clear what I can and cannot do for clients and I never promise to make the phone ring.

This is when having an appreciation for the end-to-end online selling process becomes so important. See my post titled PPC Essentials. That’s because even a perfectly designed, developed, implemented and fine-tuned Google AdWords campaign can’t make the phone ring. All an AdWords campaign can do is deliver a qualified visitor to your website. The website must convince the visitor to take the action you want; fill out a form, call you on the phone or best of all, purchase something. If the website doesn’t look professional, if the landing page isn’t relevant to the user’s search query, if the offer isn’t compelling, the visitor will simply hit the Back button. But you still pay for that click.

Most business owners will get that. But what they find difficult to comprehend is how many clicks they must buy to get a lead. They focus on the number of clicks they are buying and can’t understand why the phone isn’t ringing. There are usually two reasons why this happens.

The campaign was poorly constructed. The keywords used were too broad in scope and in many cases, the campaign manager didn’t have a good understanding of keyword matching options and they used too many broad match keywords. See my post titled The Broad Match Effect.

The probability factor. The average conversion rate for a well designed campaign is 3-5%. That means you need to buy about 25 clicks to get one lead (phone call, form-fill, etc.). Multiply your average cost-per-click (CPC) times 25. If your campaign isn’t well designed, that number goes up considerably. And remember, that’s only a lead, not a sale. See my post titled A Game of Chance.

If the campaign isn’t designed properly, it is also reflected in the quality of the lead. You probably know what I’m talking about. You just spoke with someone on the phone and say to yourself, “why did they call me? Did they not read my ad? Did they not look at my website?” The answer is, probably not! The sad truth is that users (of search engines) don’t read ads and they only scan web pages. They click on your ad, go to wherever you send them on your website and in 3-5 seconds, decide if they want to stay.

This situation only reinforces the need to design an AdWords campaign that is laser focused on the best prospects. That your keywords are relevant to your ad copy and your ad copy is relevant to your landing page. See my post titled A Chain of Success.

If you ask me to design a campaign for your business, I will rely heavily on what you tell me is a good search query from a qualified user, because you know your business infinitely better than I do. You know the market, your product or service, your competition and your geographic territory. You will need to teach me about your business, and to the extent you are interested, I will teach you about online advertising and Google AdWords. It’s a collaborative process.

So whether you decide to hire me or someone else, be aware of what an AdWords campaign manager is capable of and what they are not. If your objective is to get the phone to ring, I can’t make that promise and anyone who claims they can isn’t being honest with you.

An internet advertiser goes through many phases in their quest to maximize return on investment for their website. This is an indication of how their thought process matures and what they can actually do to improve the ROI.

I want more business – Those who are unfamiliar with internet search advertising usually see it as a new channel, meaning another way to acquire prospects they can convert into customers. Without the benefit of understanding all the various intricacies, processes, technology, etc., they are focused on the end result, more customers. They understand the need for a website and realize that search advertising is a way for people who use search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing), to find their website, out of the literally millions of other websites on the internet.

I want more visitors to my web site – Because being found by the search engines and appearing high enough in the ranking, typically on the first page, seemed relatively easy using AdWords, they naively equate more website visitors with more business. Initially, they are very encouraged by the sudden increase of website traffic and they are already beginning to count the money that they expect to be rolling in. But this increased traffic comes with a cost and then they begin to realize that more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more business.

I want better qualified visitors to my site – Either through their own hands-on experience or through on-going discussions with their campaign manager, they come to appreciate that all visitors are not equal. Unless the initial selection of keywords is extremely well chosen, there will be only a fraction of visitors that actually turn into suspects, then suspects into prospects and prospects into customers. The unfortunate reality is that search engine users don’t read ads, they scan them. Especially if your ad is near the top position, users simply click the higher ads and then decide once they see the website, if they want to stay. But you already paid for that click!

I want to know what visitors are doing when they visit my site – Just like a store owner who wants to see why a seemingly competent sales person isn’t bringing in sales, even while they are spending all this time with prospects, they will want to know as much as they can about visitors that are coming to their website, especially if they are paying to bring them there. This is why analytics and conversion tracking are so important.

I don’t want those kind of visitors, but I do want these kind – Fortunately, technology provides us with tools (web analytics & conversion tracking) that allow us to gather and report information about website visitors. We can see things like, what search engine referred the visitor, what search query they used, what keyword in their campaign was triggered, what pages they visited and what actions they took, like downloading a coupon or buying something! Once we know what keywords perform well and which ones don’t, we can take appropriate steps to eliminate or encourage certain visitors to the site.

I want visitors to take some action when they visit my site – The best way to categorize visitors is through their behavior and the best way to understand their behavior is to give them something to do when they visit your site. The more things you can track, the more things you can assign a value to. Once you know what keywords lead to which actions, then you can begin to monetize keywords and visitor behavior.

I want visitors to take a specific action when they visit my site – Once the keywords and visitor actions are prioritized and monetized, then you can begin managing the process! Now you are ready to appreciate my article on PPC Implementation Strategies.

I am willing to pay this much for that type of visitor – When you can assign a value to a specific type of visitor and you have enough historical data on that type of visitor, then you can determine just how much you are willing to spend to get them. Now you are able to look at the process as an investment. You invest this much in a process and get this much out. And remember, search advertising Google AdWords) is the fastest direct response marketing mechanism ever developed. You can adjust your campaign in a matter of minutes!

Direct-response marketing has been around for over 100 years. Since the early days of mail-order catalogs. Pre-internet direct-response marketers were at the mercy of the postal system and the placement of “inquiry cards” appearing in catalogs or magazines. The cycle time for feedback on things such as ad copy, graphics or item popularity was measured in months.

Conversion tracking is arguably the single most important feature of search engine marketing, simply because of how much it reduces the time it takes to receive feedback on many important aspects of the search engine marketing selling process; keywords, search terms, ad copy, landing pages, website features and functions, etc.

Most novice AdWords advertisers view conversion tracking as a nifty feature and not as an essential tool for optimizing campaign performance. I won’t say that conversion tracking is always necessary, but there is almost always some value to be gained by implementing some basic functionality. If you aren’t willing to consider making conversion tracking a top priority, then you aren’t serious about optimizing your AdWords account! If you hire a professional to manage your AdWords account and you don’t have accurate, reliable conversion tracking in place, you have significantly hampered their ability to make significant improvements in your AdWords campaign.

My analysis of your AdWords account, whether it is before you retain me or after, will be focused in large part on conversion tracking. How I create and manage your account is highly dependent on whether conversion tracking is in place, working properly and tracks actions that are a meaningful part of the engagement process. Without reliable conversion tracking data, it’s like throwing something “over the fence” and hoping it hits the target.

The process of optimizing an AdWords campaign is about knowing what works and what doesn’t. You want to focus on and promote what works and filter or pay less for what doesn’t. Conversion tracking is a valuable tool to help you do that. At the end of an evaluation period, you may see an increase or decrease in the number of leads or sales, but if we are unable to track these actions back to a keyword and search query, it will be more difficult to know what to adjust.

If your objective for hiring me is to simply increase traffic to your website, without concern for the quality of traffic, then don’t worry about conversion tracking. On the other hand, if your objective is to increase the amount of profit, then we need to begin the engagement talking about conversion tracking. Because if we don’t select or create meaningful actions visitors can take on your website that tell us they are interested in what you offer, you have significantly reduced my ability to optimize your account and increased the amount of time it will take to make substantive improvements.

As advertisers, we can’t control what prospects search for. We can only try to influence what they see when they perform a search. It does little good to optimize your website or build an AdWords campaign for terms prospects don’t use or don’t use often enough. Therefore, our first task is to identify what users search for, how often and then match that to what you want to promote.

There will always be more traffic than you can afford to buy. Therefore, we need to determine where is that “fine line” that determines what we display ads for and what we filter out? When I review an account’s history, I try to determine what has been working and what hasn’t. If there is little or no conversion tracking data, it just makes the process more difficult and take longer.

If you believe the nature of your business and the way you engage with prospects doesn’t lend itself to AdWords conversion tracking. Or if you believe designing, developing, implementing and managing website functionality that uses conversion tracking is not worth the investment required. Then you may be at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to optimizing your AdWords campaign.

AdWords conversion tracking is free and relatively easy to set up, assuming you have an appropriate action that is a meaningful part of the selling process that a visitor will take within 30 days. Here is a short YouTube video on how to set up conversion tracking in your AdWords account.

I often find that an advertiser has all the right conditions for implementing conversion tracking, but simply hasn’t done it, for one reason or another. If they would allow me to take the time to help them implement conversion tracking before working on their campaigns, I would. The sooner you begin collecting conversion tracking data, the better.

Even with all its advantages, conversion tracking is not perfect and should be used to analyze trends and not an exact representation of every action taken on your site. More specifically, it will not work correctly if:

The visitor does not accept cookies

The visitor deletes their cookies

The visitor does not have Java enabled in their browser

The visitor takes the action more than 30 days after clicking on the ad

The Java script tracking code is not placed on the page properly

The visitor gets “cookied” using one computer and converts or takes the action on another computer.

Even with these caveats, it’s usually well worth the time, effort and expense.

Now that you have a better appreciation for the value of and limitations of conversion tracking, let’s peel the onion back a bit further.

Because conversion tracking typically uses a 30-day cookie, cost/conv data for any given keyword on any given day will change based on newly registered conversions. Here is something for you to think about. If you want to know the effect a change you make today has on cost/conv, you need to wait at least sixty days and then look back thirty days. Otherwise you will be dealing with incomplete and misleading data.

You need to resist evaluating a new keyword based on short-term data. Also keep in mind that the number of impressions and clicks can vary considerably from day-to-day. You must be willing to have the necessary confidence, commitment and patience or you should not be doing this.

Depending on your market, conversion tracking data can increase many fold over the life of the cookie, as visitors return to your site (from non-AdWords links) and convert. I make the distinction, “from non-AdWords links”, such as a bookmark, organic listing or website referrals, because AdWords attributes the conversion to the last-clicked ad, keyword and search term, even if the keyword or ad is paused.

I make the point about paused keywords because you will continue to register conversions in your account from keywords in your old campaigns, which may be paused, and you probably won’t be looking at those keywords when we launch a new ad group or campaign(s).

One more thing. In the case where the action being tracked is something which can vary in quality, such as a completed contact form, it’s important to have a feedback mechanism so that the person receiving the completed form can provide feedback to those designing the form and those responsible for evaluating the performance of the advertising campaign. Unfortunately, all too often these forms are completed by overly aggressive marketers or individuals seeking employment. I have some clients who include me in the distribution of the completed form so I can monitor the quality of the leads and provide suggestions for improving performance.

In a perfect world, the words you use to describe your product or service would be exactly how people search for it online and your website would use those same words and phrases. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually happen. Website developers and traditional media advertisers who have experience developing advertising copy; brochures, articles, advertisements, believe they can use the same vocabulary that worked for traditional media when they build web pages for visitors from search engines. But that can be a costly mistake!

Achieving a truly optimized search engine advertising campaign goes beyond the elements of your PPC campaign, such as keywords, bid prices, ad copy, etc. It also includes how you design your website, the use of custom landing pages, the words you use on your landing pages and the rest of your website.

Many advertisers, including myself, at one time designed their website from the inside-out. In other words, how they see themselves in the market or how they see the market niche they are in. Instead of from the outside-in, meaning how visitors from search engines think and what they actually search for. The inside-out approach may work fine for prospects from other channels or existing customers. However, visitors from search engines are a unique kind of prospect. They may be somewhat naive about the topic they are interested in. They can also become overwhelmed or confused by the variety of content for what they thought was a very specific topic. They can also be quite cynical and usually have very little patience.

The way you have designed your website may make perfect sense to you, your existing customers and even industry pundants. However, if it doesn’t relate well to how prospects from search engines actually search for what you offer, what I call the search vocabulary of your market, then your campaign will be far from optimal.

There are two important reasons why you need to be aware of this. The first has to do with what prospects are thinking when they use a search engine. The second has to do with how the Google AdWords game is played. Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

If you haven’t already done so, this would be a good time to pause and read my article titled A chain of success and the subsequent linked articles.

If the way you describe your product or service and the keywords you use to build your campaign, do not match how prospects search for what you offer, you will not only limit your exposure to real prospects, but if they do manage to reach your landing page and you do not use their search vocabulary, you will have created what we call friction. It would be as if you were having a conversation with someone with a very heavy foreign accent. For example, you may advertise yourself as a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist. However, when real people with real problems search online, they are more likely to use words like therapy, counseling or help. If you don’t take this into consideration when building your campaign, you will be missing out on the biggest segment of your target market. If your landing page does not quickly and efficiently alter their thought process and bring them around to your way of thinking, you will have missed the opportunity to engage with a legitimate prospect. When a visitor from a search engine lands on your website for the first time, you have 3-5 seconds to make a connection. If you don’t, they will bounce!

When you think of using PPC advertising, whether it’s Google AdWords or Bing™Ads, you must understand that there are rules that manifest themselves in the form of a quality score. These quality scores are a way of incentivizing or punishing you for being relevant or speaking the same language as the search engine user and the search engine’s robot. If your keyword, ad copy, landing page and website do not speak the same language as your visitor, you will not only pay a hefty penalty in the form of a higher CPC, but your ad may not display for a significant number of real prospects!

If you think about the process I discuss in the A chain of success, article it is possible to pull the prospect around to your way of thinking and not break the chain, but you need to be very careful. Keywords and keyword matching options, especially negative keywords will insure that your ad only displays for the right suspects. Proper ad copy can perform a valuable translation and qualifying function. Custom landing pages, if designed properly, will keep a qualified prospect engaged long enough for you to pull them into your sales process.

When you have the benefit of historical data in your AdWords and Analytics accounts, you are on your way to learning what I call the search vocabulary of your market. On the other hand, if you are just beginning your online advertising experience and you have built your website with little or no knowledge of your market’s search vocabulary, you are at a distinct disadvantage. It means you will essentially have to buy this knowledge. By this I mean you will have to learn it over time, at some expense by buying clicks in order to capture the data. There is no keyword tool in existence that can compare with a rich search term history from your own website, AdWords or Analytics account.

Where you stand in relation to the processes I’ve discussed will determine where you are along the path to having a truly optimized PPC campaign.

Having a successful PPC campaign means we have to get a lot of things right. We have to make sure we understand and address all the steps in the buying cycle and don’t leave anything to chance or the ROI will suffer. After all, online marketing is really salesmanship in print.

Most advertisers I come in contact with struggle, knowingly or unknowingly with one important principle of advertising, understanding and empathizing with prospects from search engines. Visitors from search, organic or PPC, are different from other visitors and your website must take this into account if you are going to have a successful PPC campaign.

Visitors from search are cynical, skeptical and have very little patience. From the moment they arrive on your landing page, you have three to five seconds to make a connection. If you don’t, they will leave and probably will not come back.

When we meet someone in person we can size up the situation by looking for body signals, listening to conversation, appearance, etc. But with online advertising, we have to rely on technology and copy (ad text, website text, graphics, etc.). I like to think of the process as a chain, and this chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If any link breaks, we lose the prospect and the resources we spent getting them to this point are wasted.

Here is how I describe the chain and the links within the chain:

What the prospect is thinking

What they actually type, i.e. the search query

The linkage between the search query and the advertiser’s keyword (matching options)

The actual keyword

The ad copy; headline, description and display URL

Your landing page priorities:

Capturing the visitor attention

Generating interest

Creating desire

Taking action

Conversion tracking

Your follow up mechanism

Making adjustments to improve the process or “making the chain stronger”

Ideally, everything is tied together into one continuous thought. If it isn’t, if you have left out a step or taken too big a leap in the process or failed to anticipate what they are thinking, you will lose them.

A common mistake AdWords advertisers make is not focusing on relevance. They build campaigns, ad groups, ads and use keywords that are only somewhat related to what it is they are offering in hopes of attracting a wider audience. When that happens, they usually fail at using AdWords as a viable channel for their business.

The trap that we as advertisers often fall into is knowing too much about our own business and not enough about our prospect or our competition. The choices our prospects have besides our own view of the problem they are trying to solve. We focus too much on things like features and not enough on benefits. For example, we see a keyword or query phrase and don’t realize how broad the term is.

Have you taken the time to do competitive research? Have you tried searching the major search engines using your most popular search queries? Have you studied your competitor’s landing pages, user experience, offers, calls-to-action? Have you opted-into their offer to see how they market to you? If you haven’t, then you have a ways to go before your AdWords account is optimized.

Keyword selection and keyword matching options is perhaps the single biggest issue I see when I first look at a client’s account. This is especially true when it comes to clients who offer a service. Here is a test you can do yourself. Take some of your most popular keywords and perform a Google search to see who else is bidding for those same keywords. If they aren’t selling exactly what you are, then there is a good chance your keyword is too broad.

The other problem has to do with using and understanding how powerful and yet dangerous broad-matched keywords can be when Google experiments with synonyms.

Another way of viewing the successful AdWords model is to look at it through the lense of probability. A successful AdWords campaign is really a collection of proven, high-probability models. What is the probability that someone searching using this search query, who sees this ad and goes to this landing page, will take the desired action. Our objective is to build a campaign that gives us the most number of high-probability models. This means that there will likely be some search queries that resulted in a conversion, but you simply can’t afford to focus on that query because you can’t make the numbers work. It’s simply a matter of economics.

Think of your landing page as your “elevator pitch”. Once the prospect arrives at your landing page, or enters the elevator, you better be prepared to give it your best shot because it may be your last!